Scrap whole F2P nonsense. Make literally every item purchasable through micro transaction. You really can't call it Pay2Win if you don't win anything. I'm not going to get dragged into arguing the semantics of it all. Planetside 2 isn't about winning it's about fighting. Forever. And Ever. The whole point to the game is capturing objectives and holding them, right? No. Not when people readily leave the fight to go a hex or two away because the battle over there is more fun. We just want to kill each other over and over in increasingly violent encounters. I kill you with a knife, you kill me with a gun. You kill me with a gun, I kill you with a tank. I kill you with my tank, you say F it and kill both of us with an Orbital Strike. We don't care about the Why of it all. We just want our murder tools and a place to use them. DBG lets us pay real money for all the guns and attachments in the game. Open up the rest of it too. Charge 10 bucks a level for everything. You want Catlike 5 or Drifter Jets 5 or whatever? 50 bucks. Buy each level separately but still each slot is MAX of 50 bucks. Give us new guns. Make them all horrifically lethal. Make big explosions that kill everyone near them. Make war zones that scare the **** out of us the moment we step outside. Make us feel like it's us or them and goddamn it all it's going to be them. On a foreign planet. Stop trying to make PS2 accessible to everyone. Embrace being the harshest FPS experience available. Give us a reason to care about our characters and make us want to see them survive the brutality of futuristic warfare. F2P scrubs bring the game down. Offer one single class with one single primary and secondary and that's it and market that the demo class. Mandatory subscription just to get the game. 10 dollar class unlocks as an investment so you know the player really wants to play the class. So we don't have enemy medics running around blasting terminals with their AR while the rest of their TEAM is outside dying. Eliminating the F2P cancer and going full Pay to Play will attract a more engaged playerbase, and would allow the game to continue to generate revenue to continue. Players that fund the game care about the game.
Rofl. You know what a metaphor is, right? The "win" in P2W doesn't have to be literal. To be honest, I'd rather have all those "undesirables" you don't like playing this game than you or anyone like you.
On second thought, if F2P players wanted to stick around that would be fine, but their gear would consist of a MAC 10 and a **** whistle.
So basically, Everyone buys gear, everyone pays increasing sums of money for weapons that have no logical balance. And then to consider in F2P, you basically have them as Cannon Fodder. yeah that wouldn't attract people, as You literally have a mess with the biggest wallet having the easiest time. And I don't see how people would care more about them, even with it costing money each time to do anything. Let alone with the sheer volume of unbalanced weaponry that would be those who can afford the Ion cannon vs those who can't. If F2P is cancer, what is what you describe? With F2P, you at least get people more likely to try it, and want more of it. You also get more people easily, letting the fights be bigger rather than the spend-aholics dictating every battle.
You can already buy all the weapons. They're like 6-12 bucks each. The only thing different would be in the ability to do the same with suit slots
Which is where Money determines whom wins. Think about it for a brief moment; All weapons are side-grades. Suit Slots aren't.
I just don't understand what the issue is. I'm like BR 40 and already have everything I want on the 2 classes I play. I can't see how buying NW 5 or Jump Jets 5 would have made any difference on the balance of the game.
F2P is like "Ducks Unlimited" (place where hunters pay to build ponds to attract ducks for the hunters to shoot). The Pay players are the Hunters who are paying for the pond, and the Free players are the ducks there to entertain them. But if you don't give the Ducks any incentive to come to the pond, and you make the pond instead a toxic cement wasteland, then you won't get any ducks. And without ducks, the Hunters will having nothing to shoot... except each other. So you're suggesting that everyone playing is a Hunter (paying customer), that the Hunters who pay the most get the most powerful weapons, and you just farm those Hunters who pay the least? Why would any potential Hunter who isn't gonna pay the most, pay (and then play) to be farmed? If you scare off all the Ducks, and then progressively scare off all the Hunters who pay less, you are left with a very small population of wealthy hunters... with nothing to hunt other than the handful of other Hunters who have the *same* weapons and so give them no advantage. So the game starts small population, quickly shrinks to a smaller population, and ends up with a game of a handful of players who are playing a balanced game in a population capped, small population world.
I don't play to play the scrubs. I want competition that's better than me. There is no evidence to support your argument that no free players=dead game. Financially their absence would not be missed.
Technically, what you've said can only find supporting evidence if it completely ignores everything about this game and how the playerbase of it has behaved since it was "released" - the free players, the store browsers, and the subscription holders all. In a more matured climate, you could probably pull this trick off with at least moderate success, on some other more-rounded franchise. Your proposal would run out even some of the people that this game would miss financially due to simple loss of confidence alone.
If they were smart about cash grabs they would make membership really worth it, and start producing more faction specific stuff rather than terrible NSX weapons that only are acceptable in a very narrow field of situations (amaterasu why you gotta have scope sway, you're a knife) On the membership thing, people don't switch continents fast enough to warrant spending 100$ a year to save maybe 2 mins down time (probably time that is spent in the bathroom anyway) or getting maybe 1 new gun a month, or some cammo. The only thing worth the membership is the 3 days a month of double XP. And honestly, just the increase of players nearly triples my cert gain anyway so its not really worth it anymore either. The double resource gain is nice tho Perhaps if daybreak gave membership more useful stuff, like make koltyr a members only area (actually dont do that, people who buy XP boosters that benefit the whole squad are a blessing) Perhaps if members got priority in things other than continent queues such as going ahead of the vehicle queue Perhaps if members got extra directives they could complete for unique camo But what would really boost profits and player experience is if daybreak would develop more in the faction specific stuff. like maybe faction specific AA vehicles, and faction specific AI air vehicles, Faction specific AA guns for max, maybe even faction specific medic LA and engineer weapons. For the AA vehicles they could do stuff like, TR: 1 person manned vehicle with dual walkers that could only fire while the vehicle is deployed, 0 AV damage, little AI damage, but massive AA damage. and make it easily destroyable. VS: 1 person manned vehicle with dual lazer cannons, low fire rate, high velocity, moderate damage. NC: 1 person manned vehicle with a dual barreled AA lock on cannon Maybe for the faction specific medic guns, TR: a double barreled assault rifle (fires 2 shots at a time) with a moderate fire rate, moderate dmg, but high recoil, making it a spray and pray weapon in cqc and a tap fire weapon at mid range. VS: a long ranged head hunting machine that does poorly in cqc, maybe essentially the old phaseshift, but with a 4x optic max. NC: a high dmg rail gun with a very slow fire rate and a heat mechanic (both ammo and a heat mechanic) limiting it to a slow 5 round burst. maybe like vandal level damage stuff that adds flavor rather than frustration
